Joe Biden concedes White House gun push has faltered

Vice President Joe Biden insisted to a subdued audience Tuesday that he and President Barack Obama “haven’t given up” on gun control.

But his remarks came at the first White House event since the Senate’s failed April 17 background checks vote. And all that he had to show gun control supporters by way of progress was a list of completed or mostly completed executive actions — and a set of new guidebooks for churches and schools on how to deal with a mass shooting situation.

No new sponsors or votes for the background check bill have emerged publicly. Neither has any sort of timeline for when Congress might take up the measure again.

“I had hoped we would have assembled in this auditorium earlier,” Biden said. “I had hoped we would have assembled here a couple of months ago celebrating the first in a number of victories that we will have.”

So Biden conceded the obvious Tuesday: the White House gun push in Congress has faltered.

Instead, Biden claimed a partial victory based on what he described as an evolution in the mood of the country. More voters, he said, are willing to punish members of Congress who oppose gun control measures.

“I assure you, the one thing that each of us have been saying to our colleagues about these votes is the country has changed,” Biden said. “You will pay a price, a political price, for not, for not getting engaged and dealing with gun safety.”

Yet Tuesday’s event illustrated how the White House and the gun control groups with which it has worked closely since January have grown apart: The groups received no briefing before the White House unveiled its report to the press on Monday.

The White House’s public silence over the last two months has essentially ceded the issue to these outside groups.

“I don’t know how much there is for [the White House] to do,” said a representative from one of the groups that had been meeting with Reed. “The president doesn’t twist arms and have lunch, there’s no money to put a post office or a research facility in somebody’s district. What do you do other than travel places — and now they don’t even travel.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said after Biden’s speech that the White House now has less influence on senators than the gun control groups do.

“The five or six senators who are going to move our way aren’t going to do so because of pressure from the White House,” Murphy said. “They’re going to do so because of political pressure from outside groups who have millions of dollars to spend against them.”

Yet Murphy said it will still be necessary for Obama and Biden to speak more about gun control.

“The White House should be talking about this every chance that they get,” he said. “I’m not disappointed in the level of interest, but if I could have the president and vice president talking about gun violence every day, I’d be happy.”